Monday, March 10, 2014

The United States Copyright Office brought together stakeholders from across the spectrum of intellectual property producers and consumers to discuss various ways to approach the issue of orphaned works during two days of roundtable discussions Monday March 10th and Tuesday March 11th, 2014, held at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

While the problem has not changed, the public and the stakeholders are much more engaged on the matter now, and the discourse seems to be taking a more reasoned approach. The Association of Research Libraries, for example, has changed their position from a call for orphan works legislation to an approach that utilities fair use. Here, they note "Unlike any option that will require legislative action, fair use is already the law...certain rightsholder groups are sufficiently fearful about misuse of their abandoned property that seemingly no search will be sufficiently diligent for them."

One thing is clear, this time around, the provisions of the bills that we will likely see in the next iteration will be better and more clear than what was in the 2008 bills. Below are a series of images from the roundtable discussions on the subject.